Canadian Left Rejects Freedom Of Religion

The Acton Institute Powerblog posted an article on Ontario directly interfering with what the Catholic Church can and cannot teach in its schools. According to Laurel Broten, the Education Minister of Ontario:

… [the] province’s publicly funded Catholic schools may not teach students that abortion is wrong because such teaching amounts to ‘misogyny,’ which is prohibited in schools under a controversial anti-bullying law.

A religious moral teaching, in this case abortion, is legally banned in religious schools. One would think the solution would be for churches to refuse any government assistance. However, those who would teach and study in private religious schools are not guaranteed a place in the economic and cultural parts of society because they were not educated in a secular, government-funded institution. This amounts to a kind of shunning by secular government of religious adherents for their lack of conformity to secular education, which is dominated by feminist and atheistic philosophies.

When secular government determines the education standards without allowing for non-secular ideas, it sets up a system whereby religiously minded educators and students can be potentially disqualified from opportunities simply because their religious thinking may not conform to the secular standards.

The same thing is quite possible in America. Teachers earning high degrees, such as Masters and Doctorates, can be rejected from employment in the government educational system on the grounds they are not qualified as potential educators. This lack of qualification does not stem from any genuine lack of knowledge or skill, but rather from a lack of training in secular knowledge, which strives to be devoid of religious influences.

In a secular society, religion is a private matter for personal experience, but once brought into the open fields of thought and study, it becomes grounds for discriminating against qualified citizens based simply on the fact that they will not agree with secular thought that their religious beliefs are null and void.